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A gas van or gas wagon (Template:Lang-de) was a vehicle reequipped as a mobile gas chamber. During World War II Nazi Germany used gas vans on a large scale as a extermination method to murder inmates of asylums, Romani people, Jews, and prisoners in occupied Poland, Belarus, and Yugoslavia.

Nazi Germany

The use of gas vans by the Nazis to murder Jews, mentally ill people, Romani people and prisoners in occupied territories during World War II originated with the Nazi Euthanasia Program since 1939. Ordered to find a sutitable method of killing the Technical Institute for the Detection of Crime ("Kriminaltechnisches Institut der Sicherheitspolizei", abbreviated KTI) of the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (RSHA) determined to gas victims with Carbon monoxide. In October 1939 the Nazis started gassing prisoners in Fort VII near Posen. The first victims were Polish and Jewish inmates of asylums for the mentally ill. Witnesses report that since December 1939 mobile gas chambers were used to kill the inmates of asylums in Pommerania, Eastern Prussia and Poland. The vans were built for the Sonderkommando Lange and intended to speed up the killings. Instead of transporting the victims to the gas chambers, the gas chambers were transported to the victims. Most likely devised by specialists from the Referat II D of the RSHA these mobile gas chambers worked under the same principles as the stationary gas chambers: Through a rubber hose the driver released pure CO out of steel cylinders into the air tight special box construction placed on the carrier. The vans resembled moving vans or delivery lorries and were labelled “Kaiser’s Kaffee Geschäft” for camouflage. They were not called "gas vans" at the time, but “Sonder-Wagen”, “Spezialwagen” (special vans) and “Entlausungswagen” (delousing vans). The Lange commando killed patients in numerous hospitals in the Wartheland during 1940. They drove to the hospitals, collected patients, loaded them into the vans and gassed them while driving away. From 21 May to 8 June 1940 the Sonderkommando Lange killed 1558 sick people from Soldau concentration camp alone.

In August 1941, SS chief Heinrich Himmler attended a demonstration of a mass-shooting of Jews in Minsk arranged by Arthur Nebe, after which he vomited. Regaining his composure, Himmler decided that alternative methods of killing should be found. He turned to Nebe to explore more "convenient" ways of killing that were less stressful for the killers. Nebe decided to try experimenting by murdering Soviet mental patients, first with explosives near Minsk, and then with automobile exhaust at Mogilev. Nebe's experiments led to the utilization of the gas van. This vehicle had already been used in 1940 for the gassing of East Prussian and Pomeranian mental patients in the Soldau concentration camp. Another source states that the vans were first tested on Soviet prisoners in Sachsenhausen.

Gas vans were used, particularly at Chełmno extermination camp, until gas chambers were developed as a more efficient method for killing large numbers of people. There were two types of gas vans in operation, used by the Einsatzgruppen in the East. The Opel-Blitz, weighing 3.5 tons, and the larger Saurerwagen, weighing 7 tons. In Belgrade, the gas van was known as "Dušegupka" and in the occupied parts of the USSR similarly as "душегубка" (dushegubka, literally (feminine) soul killer/exterminator). The SS used the euphemisms Sonderwagen, Spezialwagen or S-wagen ("special vehicle") for the vans. The gas vans were specifically designed to direct deadly exhaust fumes via metal pipes into the airtight cargo compartments, where the intended victims had been forcibly stuffed to capacity. In most cases the victims were suffocated and poisoned from carbon monoxide and other toxins in the exhaust as the vans were transporting them to fresh pits or ravines for mass burial.

The use of gas vans had two disadvantages:

1. It was slow — some victims took twenty minutes to die.
2. It was not quiet — the drivers could hear the victims' screams, which they found distracting and disturbing.

By June 1942 the main producer of gas vans, Gaubschat Fahrzeugwerke GmbH, had delivered 20 gas vans in two models (for 30–50 and 70–100 individuals) to Einsatzgruppen, out of 30 ordered from that company. Not one gas van was extant at the end of the war. The existence of gas vans first came to light in 1943 during the trial of Nazi collaborators involved in the gassing of 6,700 civilians in Krasnodar. The total number of gas van gassings is unknown.

The gas vans are extensively discussed in some of the interviews in Claude Lanzmann's film Shoah.

Soviet Union

In the Soviet Union during the 1930s prisoners were gassed to death on an experimental basis in the back of a specially adapted airtight van on the way to Butuvo, a phony firing range, where the NKVD executed its prisoners and buried them. The use of the gas van was supervised by Isay Berg. He had become chief of the administrative-economic department in Moscow’s NKVD in the summer of 1937. It was up to him to prepare the Butovo firing range for the mass execution of people from greater Moscow and to ensure that these executions occurred without interruption. He himself was arrested on 3 August 1938 and admitted to depravity and corruption.

See also

• Execution van
• Walter Rauff
• August Becker
• The Holocaust
• Operation Reinhard
• Charcoal-burning suicide

Bibliography

• Alberti, Michael (2006). Die Verfolgung und Vernichtung der Juden im Reichsgau Wartheland 1939-1945 (in German). Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz Verlag. ISBN 978-3-447-05167-5. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Beer, Mathias (1987). "Die Entwicklung der Gaswagen beim Mord an den Juden" (PDF). Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte (in German). 35 (3): 403–417.
• Colton, Timothy J. (1995). Moscow: Governing the Socialist Metropolis. Cambridge, Massachussetts: Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0-674-58749-6. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Friedlander, Henry (1997). The Origins of Nazi Genocide: From Euthanasia to the Final Solution. Chapel Hill: Univ of North Carolina Press. ISBN 978-0-8078-4675-9. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Merridale, Catherine (2002). Night of Stone: Death and Memory in Twentieth-Century Russia. New York: Penguin. ISBN 978-0-14-200063-2. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Vatlin, Alexander (2016). Seth Bernstein (ed.). Agents of Terror: Ordinary Men and Extraordinary Violence in Stalin's Secret Police. Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Pres. ISBN 978-0-299-31080-6. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)

References

1. "SS use of mobile gassing vans". A damaged Magirus-Deutz van found in 1945 in Kolno, Poland. World War II Today. 2011. Retrieved April 22, 2013. Source: Office of the United States Chief Counsel for Prosecution of Axis Criminality: Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression – Washington, U.S Govt. Print. Office, 1946, Vol III, p. 418;
2. Bartrop, Paul R. (2017). "Gas Vans". In Paul R. Bartrop; Michael Dickerman (eds.). The Holocaust: An Encyclopedia and Document Collection. Vol. 1. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO. p. 234–235. ISBN 978-1-4408-4084-5. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
3. "Gas Wagons: The Holocaust's mobile gas chambers", an article of Nizkor Project
4. Beer 1987, p. 405.
5. Alberti 2006, p. 326-327.
6. ^ Beer 1987, p. 405-406.
7. Alberti 2006, p. 327-328.
8. Friedlander 1997, p. 139.
9. Beer 1987, p. 406.
10. Longerich, Peter (2012). Heinrich Himmler: A Life, p. 547, ISBN 978-0-19-959232-6.
11. Lewy, Guenter (2000). The Nazi Persecution of the Gypsies, pp. 204–208, ISBN 0-19-512556-8.
12. The path to genocide: essays on launching the final solution By Christopher R. Browning
13. The destruction of the European Jews, Part 804, Volume 1 By Raul Hilberg
14. Saul Friedländer. The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945, HarperCollins, 2007, p. 234 ISBN 978-0-06-019043-9
15. Ernst. Klee, Willi Dressen, Volker Riess (1991). "The gas-vans (3. 'A new and better method of killing had to be found')". The Good Old Days: The Holocaust As Seen by Its Perpetrators and Bystanders. Konecky Konecky. p. 69. ISBN 1568521332. Retrieved 2013-05-08.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
16. Patrick Montague (2012). "The Gas Vans (Appendix I)". Chełmno and the Holocaust: The History of Hitler's First Death Camp. Univ of North Carolina Press. p. Appendix I: The Gas Van. ISBN 0807835277. Retrieved 2018-09-15.
17. "Gaswagen, from deathcamps.org, in German". 2006. Retrieved 2018-10-06.
18. Merridale 2002, p. 200.
19. ^ Colton 1998, p. 286. sfn error: no target: CITEREFColton1998 (help)
20. Vatlin 2016, p. 11.
21. Vatlin 2016, p. 15.
22. Vatlin 2016, p. 67.

External links

• The Development of the Gas-Van from the Jewish Virtual Library
• Film: Short explanation about the Gas vans at the Nuremberg trials (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum )
• NAZI GAS VANS By Rob Arndt

• Infrastructure of the Holocaust
• Execution equipment
• Einsatzgruppen
• Vans